Arts in Crisis? Kennedy Center’s Michael Kaiser 10 Point Plan

When you hear Arts in Crisis is the topic of the talk, you know there’s a danger it’s going to be a swamp of generalizations and repackaged news and statistics we all know. But get Michael Kaiser, President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts talking on the topic, and a bunch of heard-it-all-before arts admins and journos perk up in their seats. There’s a reason Kaiser’s been a turnaround guy for arts organizations including Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Foundation, American Ballet Theater, and the Royal Opera House. He let us in on his secrets in a succinct ten point plan that actually had some surprises and non-intuitive thinking.

Part way through his conversation with Chris Coleman at Portland Center Stage, Kaiser acknowledged that in the 69 cities in 50 states to which he will have brought this talk when all is said and done, there are struggling arts organizations who have said to him, “I’m just trying to meet payroll, I can’t do what you’re talking about here.” And he responded, “You can’t afford not to.”

The talk was spurred, Kaiser reported, by reading in the papers about arts organizations after the stock market crash, cutting their seasons, cancelling productions, trimming programming. And he says he knew, “This is not the way to handle a funding crisis.” Kaiser’s central point: “Revenue comes from really strong, exciting work. People get excited about the work, and your family gets bigger. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. On the other hand, if you cut programming as a first response, do less work, less marketing, your family starts to look elsewhere where something exciting is going on. You get sicker and sicker.”

The Kennedy Center has started a project called Arts in Crisis that is offering consulting to 760 organizations.

Michael Kaiser’s Ten Rules to Turn Around an Organization

1. There has to be a leader. In times of crisis everybody has a solution. But you need one leader to lead the charge.
2. The leader must have a plan. Kaiser doesn’t believe working harder is going to do it. “I ask them, ‘You were working hard at marketing before, right?’ Working harder is not enough.
3. You can’t save your way to health. You don’t get healthy by getting smaller, by doing less. He says, “My staff will tell you I squeeze every nickel til the buffalo poops, but that’s behind the scenes.”
4. Focus on today and tomorrow not yesterday. There’s no time for blame. When things are bad many people sit around talking about where it went wrong. That’s not healthy.
5. Extend your planning calendar. You have to plan your art. Most organizations plan their art too close to event. You need to plan four and five years out. First, you can make art better if you take more time. Second, you can do a better job fundraising. “I listen to the funder, find out what do they like to fund. I have menu of five years of projects, so I can choose best event for funder.” Finally, “It helps me to educate my audience to want to see something that is not so accessible. I’m excited about projects that are transformational. But this requires some education of the audience. And with time, you can educate in advance. Creativity has been beaten out of so many arts organizations. Planning ambitious work four years out, creating big vision is what’s needed.”
6. Marketing is more than brochures and email blasts. There are two cateogories, programmatic marketing to sell tickets and institutional marketing to get people excited about the institution as a whole. Kaiser gave a number of examples of institutional marketing including getting the Alvin Ailey Dance onto the Phil Donahue show, into the Clinton inaugural (as I recall), and having them do a Central Park performance.
7. There has to be one spokesperson for the organization, and the message must be positive. Often there are a lot of people in the organization talking about financial problems and not about what the organization is doing. There are many more funders that will fund organizations that are healthy than want to fund those in crisis.
8. “If you are in trouble, you don’t have time to focus on the $20 giver. I think the $20 gift is important, but you’ll run out of time chasing it if you’re in trouble. On the other hand, you also can’t be unrealistic and think you’re going to get one big gift.”
9. The board has to be willing to restructure itself. An organization goes through life cycle, and a board goes through life cycle too. The board that is necessary to launch an organization acts like staff. At Ailey, they sewed costumes and did bookkeeping. But that’s not the board that’s needed decades later.
10. You have to have the discipline to do the other 9 things all the time, continuously. Always evaluating the board, always planning.

Kaiser related the experience of going to board members when he joined a troubled institution and asking, “Who do you know who can help us? And the funny thing was,” he said, “none of them had ever met another person.” “They were embarrassed about us, ” he said. “My job as executive director is to make my board unembarrassed, to make the board want to bring in their friends into the family.”

Regarding planning, he said, “People don’t want to do it, they say, ‘I want to be flexible.’ I tell them I do it in pencil. I move things around, but you have to plan.” He talked about being in position to “catch wave of recovery,” and that the organizations planning exciting programming now will be in a position to capitalize on the recovery.

He was asked about fundraising and talked about the stimulus provided by challenge grants. “I made a fake challenge grant for our organization. We had a board member who gives $1 million every year. I asked him to commit to a five-year commitment, and I called it a challenge grant. And people got excited that there was someone who believed in the organization enough to make that commitment and we met the $5 million challenge in a year. “It’s programming and marketing that create fundraising. The key fundraisers for the organization are the artists and the marketers.”

“If you think, now is time to do accessible work, now is time to be cautious, boring, you won’t look as competitive to funders.”

There are two problems in art, Kaiser says. We have problem proving (or improving) worker productivity. It took 40 minutes last year to play a Beethoven piano concerto, and it takes 40 minutes this year and the next and the next. “The second is that real earned income potential stays flat. With rapidly increasing costs, fixed earned income stays same, we don’t add any seats to the house. Unfortunately, the main technique to deal with this is to raise ticket prices. So you have at the Metropolitan Opera, two of best seats to standard performance cost upwards of 700 dollars. It’s too expensive. The biggest challenge is how to change ticket prices. When people are priced out of tickets, they start to believe the arts are not for them. Arts are not irrelevant, just too expensive.

“We need to make it enticing, fun, interesting. And not from a moral perspective. We forget that we exist to inspire, educate, entertain people. We sometimes push people away.

“I believe we haven’t scratched the surface of potential donors. We need to do a better job of communicating who we are, do exciting programming, good institutional marketing, and have a board that is what it needs to be.”

Kaiser talked about what defines an effective board:

1. Be involved in development and approve plan of organization
2. Approve and understand the annual budget
3. Hire, fire, and compensate the ED and AD
4. Help create resources. “I don’t believe the conventional wisdom that board is responsible for fundraising. Staff is responsible for fundraising.” Staff needs to make it attractive, easy, and fun for board to get involved.
5. Serve as ambassadors to the community. “As I’m traveling around the country, it’s amazing the awful things board members say about their own organizations!”

Kaiser said, “I think about the board as individuals. I have my menu of projects, and I ask a board member to get involved in the project. And I let them. They meet the artists, maybe the costume designers. When they get excited, they almost always involve their friends and associates. I get each member of my board to buy into a different project. When they come together, they’re not just talking about budgets, they all want to talk about their projects! Then I have champions for everything I’m doing.”

With regard to corporate sponsors, he separates them into two groups. Some, like Coke, want exposure, so they’ll sponsor the biggest organizations in the major cities. But some want a very special event for small group. They’ll underwrite the evening. They come backstage and meet the dancers.

And finally, he had an interesting take on the greying of audiences that has symphonies and ballets tied in knots. He sees a sociological trend in arts participation. Children are introduced to the arts in school.
Many participate until they get to their teens. Then a lot of people stop for 30 years, focus on building a career and a family. But when they’re about 45-55, they find their way back into the arts. “So I think we keep replenishing them with new 45-50 year olds.” He’s concerned though about the current generation that’s not getting arts in the public schools. “We have a lot of remedial work to do with this generation.”